The Most Oppressive Clause in Microsoft's EULA...

From: democratix (demokratix_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 10/14/04 

Date: 13 Oct 2004 18:10:54 -0700

...and typical of proprietary software in general:

*******
* Limitations on Reverse Engineering, Decompilation and
Disassembly. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or
disassemble the SOFTWARE, except and only to the extent that
such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law
notwithstanding this limitation.
*******

In effect:

If you want to get some end-use out of these instructions, you can run
them on your computer, but you're not allowed to figure out what your
computer is doing when it runs them.

Sorry, let me read that again to make sure I understood it...

You are not allowed to figure out what your computer is doing!

... that's what I thought.

At any time now or in the future that you set your computer to run
these instructions, any parts of that computer which may reveal useful
information about what it's actually doing, become our sovereign
property, and we say you can't touch or look at them.

I hate to break it to the corporations, but it's my computer and I'll
learn whatever I want from it, and use that knowledge however I see
fit. The only reason I bought the hardware in the first place is to be
able to investigate what it does, and manipulate it to my own
purposes, and no one is going to convince me that they own an
instruction. I find it insulting they would even try.

Owning intsructions, ha, how absurd. Next we'll have copyrights that
persist even after the artist is dead.

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